The B-52s are on the radar again with the raucous Funplex

Don’t bother checking the calendar: You haven’t been sucked into a time shifting wormhole or lurched up from a lengthy coma. It’s  and the B-s really do have a new album, Funplex, their first in !16 years.

But Funplex is no comeback. e B-s have toured steadily since the late ’s, and have never actually gone away. Still, the gap between ’s Good Stuff and Funplex—punctuated by two new tracks for ’s Time Capsule retrospective—certainly represents a long studio drought.

“We’ve been performing for the last  years, so we did feel the need for new material to perform live,” says guitarist Keith Strickland. “We had tried writing seven years ago, but we weren’t on the same page creatively, so we abandoned that idea but continued to perform. e idea of a new album evolved out of our performance.”

Funplex is a mash-up of the B-s’ early immediacy and their later, more polished approach with the emphasis, as always, on partying out of bounds, from the frenetic pulse of “Pump” to the guitar churn of “Hot Corner” to the expansive dance mood of “Juliet of the Spirits.”

“It’s sort of a combination of everything we’ve done,” says Strickland. “I did think in terms of certain iconic sounds, like the guitar in ‘Pump,’ but to me, it was something to play with and not so much trying to recapture anything or being nostalgic in any way. I feel like we have our language and our own universe, so it was fun to use the cheesy keyboards and twangy guitars as almost iconic samples. It was like a little art piece for me, in a way. It was taking things out of context and putting them in a new environment.”

Like most of the band’s albums, Funplex began with Strickland composing the foundational music at home before subjecting it to the full band process.

“I was listening to a lot of electronic dance music and a lot of rock ‘n’ roll,” he recalls. “When I was thinking what I’d do for this album, I had to think, ‘What would interest me?’ And that interested me—putting electronic music together with rock, together with our sound. at was a pivotal moment for me in terms of inspiration. It was a good jumping off point.”

Funplex’s dance/rock hybridization continued once Strickland met with vocalists Fred Schneider, Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson, whose distinctive yelps, warbles and manic energy have shaped the B-s’ identity from their 1976Start.

Is chaos,” laughs Strickland, as he describes the band’s writing sessions. “We all arrange the final structure of the songs together. I’ve often said it’s like trying to turn jazz into rock ‘n’ roll. Fred, Kate and Cindy will listen to the music and begin to form a storyline or focus to the song and pick out melodies. It’s backward from the way most people do it.”